I think there’s a couple of different ways to look at this: from an economic point of view, and then separately from a moral point of view.

The Economic Arguments

Writing and presenting a talk – whether it’s at a user group or a conference – takes both a significant amount of time, and a significant amount of cash.

A new tech talk can take anywhere between 20-40 hours to write, rehearse and polish. That’s 1/2 to a full working week. It takes significantly longer if the talk needs to be accompanied with example code or even a usable code library.

Unless the event is local, you can add in up to two days of travel time on top, plus the time spent at the event itself. And you can add in more days on top to cover both international travel and dealing with jetlag.

It’s impossible to travel without spending money. Whether it’s fuel for the car and car parking charges, or train tickets, or flights, none of that happens without money. And let’s not forget accommodation!

Someone, somewhere, is paying for that time. And someone, somewhere, has to hand over the cash to pay for the travel.

So every speaker – and every employer who lets staff do speaking gigs on company time – has to treat any speaking opportunity as an economic transaction. You may not have ever thought of it in those terms before, but that’s what is happening.

It’s down to individual speakers (and/or their employer) to decide whether or not doing a talk is “worth it” to them. We’ve all got our own motives, and there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to it.

I run my own company, and I have over three years now of financial data on whether or not it is worth it or not for me. If you’re curious, the series of talks I’ve been doing to date has cost my firm over £13K in cash paid out, and over £5K in time spent on talks instead of on billable work. So let’s call that about £20K. That’s just for giving talks here in the UK. There’s no international travel at all in that. And it doesn’t account for the many many evenings and weekends I’ve given up of my free time too.

These are just my costs. For several reasons, I am an outlier:

1. I write a brand new talk for every speaking opportunity, which is very unusual.
2. I have non-coeliac gluten-intolerance (NCGI). It’s an incurable auto-immune disease. Eating out is very difficult, so I often end up renting an apartment so that I have a kitchen to cook in. That does cost a lot more per-night than a hotel room does.
3. I’m not tied to an office desk, and can work from pretty much anywhere. I can do billable work on trains and from rented apartments, to reduce the amount of billable hours lost. Many people aren’t that fortunate.
4. Those costs include the A/V equipment I use to video my talks.

There’s another side to the economic argument, to do with the event itself, and it’s where the moral arguments overlap.

The Moral Point Of View

Generally speaking, events fall into these groups:

• Community meetups, such as monthly user group nights. Tickets are free (as a rule). Sponsors cover venue costs, free food, and any swag handed out.
• Community conferences. The tickets aren’t free, but (normally) the tickets are subsidised by the conference’s sponsors. The organisers may (or may not) generate a surplus.
• Commercial conferences. They’re run to make a profit for the organisers, and it may even be their sole or primary business.
• Marketing events. They exist to promote the company in one form or another (normally as the third leg in tripod economics), or to provide a platform for attending companies to promote themselves. The economics for these range greatly. Some are run for profit, some are not. Many of them are put on by professional event organisers.

There’s overlap between these groups, and sometimes an event can appear to be one kind (e.g. a community conference) to the attendees when, behind the scenes, it’s actually a commercial conference or a marketing event of some kind.

I think there’s a couple of moral issues here, spread across the different event groups.

The first problem is accessibility. How do we create speaking opportunities for new speakers? Generally speaking, they’re the least likely to have the economic means to pay their own way.

For me, this is important. We need new voices all the time. We need new experiences to be shared, and new perspectives to be shared. It isn’t healthy for the same people to be trotting out the same stuff year after year. It isn’t healthy for our professions, and it isn’t healthy for our communities.

Yes, user groups offer a way to get started. But how do new speakers get from there to other opportunities? Some of them become developer advocates, and (amongst other duties) it becomes their job to speak at events on behalf of their employer. Others find a way to swallow the costs themselves. Most simply drop out, unable to find a way forward.

Then the other problem is around unpaid services. If I’m speaking at your for-profit event, I am (in effect, and often in law too) a supplier. I am supplying a service (a presentation) to your business. Your business is using that service (along with the services of your other suppliers) to make money.

And when your business insists that it cannot afford to pay the suppliers, and trots out an endless stream of creative excuses why, this is in effect a zero-sum game. For them, it’s not about the economics. It’s all about the for-profit event holders believing that they can only have a successful event if they get services supplied for free.

When you come across these people, you’ve got to take a long, hard look at the economic transaction. Are there clear benefits, and are they worth the cost? And is it worth setting aside the moral objections?

Fortunately, as with most things in the software industry, we can look to other (arguably more mature!) walks of life, where this kind of thing has already happened, and learn from them. The music industry is full of stories about pay-to-play gigs, for example.

And there’s always the gold standard. Would a plumber do it, either at all, or on those terms?

JSON is by far the most common API request format. I design, build, and fix API servers for a living. I write a lot of API tests as a result.

I often find myself wishing that I could write JSON directly in PHP code like this:

$payload = {
  "hello": {
     "fish": $fishType
  }
};

This would save me a lot of time when I’m copying examples from API documentation or JIRA tickets into my test suites.

You’ll find a patch that adds this to PHP 7.0 here: diff against PHP-7.0 tracking branch.

Some caveats: I’m no expert on the internals of PHP, and this patch is very naive. It probably breaks things in ways that I’m not aware of. It passes the PHP test suite locally, but that doesn’t mean you should be trying this in production.

Here’s some examples of what it allows you to do:

<?php

// this is an array syntax that PHP
// already supports
$a1 = [
  "hello" => "world"
];
var_dump($a1);

// and this should be an array too now
$a2 = [
  "hello": "world"
];
var_dump($a2);

// this is forced to be an array
$a3 = (array){
  "hello": "world"
};
var_dump($a3);

// and this should be an object
//
// you can still use array assignment inside
$a4 = {
  "hello": "world",
  "goodbye" => "everyone"
};
var_dump($a4);

// this should be an object inside an object
$a5 = {
  "hello": {
     "fish": "trout"
  }
};
var_dump($a5);

// create an array of objects
$a6 = [
    {
        "hello": "world"
    },
    {
        "goodbye" => "everyone"
    }
];
var_dump($a6);

// this is an object that contains an array
$a7 = {
    "hello": [
        "world",
        "trout"
    ]
};
var_dump($a7);

// we can still cast nested arrays to objects
$a8 = {
    "hello": (object)[
        "world",
        "trout"
    ]
};
var_dump($a8);

// we can pass data objects as arguments too
function provide($arg1) {
    return $arg1;
}
var_dump(provide({"hello": "world"}));

// we can define and return data objects
// without having to assign to a var first
function returnObject() {
    return { "hello": "world" };
}

Let me know if you’d also find this useful. If there’s enough interest, I’ll see if I can convince someone who is involved in the world of PHP.internals to help me get this turned into an RFC.

We had a great evening looking at the underlying causes of negative code reviews, and what you can tackle to address them. I hope you find the deck useful.

Yesterday, I ran into a segfault that I couldn’t work around. It is happening with Apache + mod_php, running inside a Centos 6-based Docker container. Docker is hosted on Ubuntu 15.04.

Here are the steps I took to enable core dumps for Apache inside the container, so that I could examine the segfault.

On Ubuntu (the host machine):

1. sudo sysctl -w fs.suid_dumpable=2
2. sudo sysctl -w kernel.core_pattern=/tmp/core-%e-%s-%u-%g-%p-%t

That’s it. Your Docker container automatically inherits these settings, and Apache will start coredumping without being restarted.

Why Does This Work?

With Docker, because it’s not a virtual machine in the way that VMWare or VirtualBox is, the container inherits the settings of your host operating system. Inherits, and can’t change them inside the container (which is not ideal).

You have to enable coredumps on your host operating system.

Ubuntu 15.04 ships with coredumps already enabled. Ubuntu also ships with an app that gathers coredumps and ships them off to Canonical for inspection – this is the ‘A system error has been detected’ dialog box that appears all too frequently on a modern Ubuntu system.

Ubuntu’s helper app can’t intercept coredumps that occur within a Docker container, so you don’t have to worry about it in there.

I was there to present two talks – Introducing a Quality Model For MVC Applications, and Ways To Measure Your ORM’s Cost. It’s the first time since the php|cruise back in 2004 that I’ve presented twice at the same conference, and brings me up to something like 15 unique talks and workshops presented over the last 11 years.

I want to highlight one talk in particular from this year’s conference – Matt Cockayne talking about being a good code scout. This talk got promoted from the Unconference track to a spare slot on the Sunday morning. I’ve been thinking about pitching a keynote about how we all need to be great ambassadors for PHP, and I think Matt’s message would make a great keynote for our community.

Whether I’m speaking or just attending, I always enjoy the PHP North West Conference. Their conference team always do everything that they can to make each conference the best that it can be. In my opinion, the explosion of quality, community-based PHP conferences in Europe owes much to the example set particularly by PHP North West. We’ve come a long way from when I started speaking back in 2004

I’m really grateful that conference committees here in the UK – both PHP North West and PHP UK – continue to give me opportunities to come and talk at their conferences. Whether it’s about the problems of framework lock-in, component-based architectures, Git workflows, or indeed about driving quality, I’m often talking about things years before the PHP community moves that way. My work is often about solving problems most people don’t yet realise that they have, and that can’t be an easy sell, both within the committees that select talks for conferences nor to attendees when they’re buying their tickets.

This year’s conference may be over, but there’s no rest to be had.

• I’m already preparing another talk to deliver to the PHP Oxford user group later this month, called “Why Do We Test?” – expect plenty of ethical dilemmas in this one
• November sees me once again volunteering at Aberystwyth University, coaching 2nd year Comp Sci (and related) students on job hunting
• I’ll be speaking at PHP Surrey at the start of January 2016, possibly on writing a test suite for PHPFastCGI – you should come just to watch Andrew give his PHPFastCGI talk, it’s cry-out-loud funny

… and I’ve promised both Glasgow PHP and The Edinburgh PHP User Group that I’ll come up and present to them before the end of 2016.

Here is the original blurb for this talk …

Your project has adopted an ORM such as Doctrine because it’s the quickest way to hook your code up to your database. Things are looking up, and your website is about to take off. Aaaand then the first complaints start to come in that your site isn’t coping with the new customers. You can’t find a problem in your own code. Could it be the ORM that’s the problem? How can you tell?

In this talk, Stuart will show you how you can use off-the-shelf open-source tools to work out what your ORM is doing, and whether or not it is the cause of your performance problems. He’ll show you how to measure the database itself and the ORM code, as well as providing useful strategies to reduce the cost of your ORM without having to abandon the ORM altogether. Finally, he’ll show you how you can extend these techniques to other parts of your application, so that you’re never in the dark again.

Here’s the original blurb for this talk …

Your integration, functional and non-functional testing gives you a good idea if your code will work on Production. But how do you go about measuring the quality of code that already seems to work? How do you make that measurement repeatable? How do you share it with clients in government, finance or other large enterprises who are looking for a 3-5 year shelf-life from your code?

In this talk, Stuart will introduce you to SQuaRE, the international standard collection for software quality. He’ll give you a tour of all of the available and upcoming standards in this area, before taking a deep dive into the Product Quality Model from ISO/IEC 25010:2011. He’ll explain what a quality measurement is, how you link them to your project’s quality criteria, and how you incorporate them into code reviews, QA teams and management decisions.

You’ll leave this talk ready to start measuring and improving the quality of your product or service, with the tools you need to not only maintain quality but also to keep increasing it over time, even when faced with staff turnover.

And that got me thinking.

You see, the SLR as a platform is one that I’ve grown up with. I’ve been shooting with SLRs for the best part of 20 years now. The SLR isn’t just my camera of choice, it’s the one that I know best. Hopefully some of that comes through in the photos I’ve posted here over the years.

But it also means that I don’t see the SLR in the same way that you do, if you’ve been using your camera phone or point-and-shoot compact to date. I’ve never seen the SLR that way, because it was my first kind of camera.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever given much thought to whether a DSLR is too bulky, or too difficult to use. Well, there was that one time I was shooting with a monster Sigma 400mm lens …

Are DSLRs Too Large And Bulky?

Well, the fact that I need a dedicated camera bag alone makes it hard to argue against the idea that it’s bulky. The camera and lens straddle the entire width of the backpack. There’s nowhere for a dedicated macro lens to fit. And the 400mm zoom lens that I have my eye on? I’ll need to find a bigger backpack before I can buy that. My camera bag is already much bigger than my hiking rucksack.

This thing is heavy too. I hurt my right arm earlier this year moving an old amp that I was getting ready to sell on. Until a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t handle my DSLR camera body and lens because of the weight. I’m not sure how long it will be until I can try an all-day shoot again.

So yes, DSLRs are undeniably large and bulky. But are they too large and bulky? I think that depends on whether you see yourself as a photographer, or whether you prefer to take photos.

When I go out with the camera, I’m going out specifically to do photography. The camera isn’t tagging along on some other adventure. The camera is the reason why I’m going out in the first place.

The majority of my camera bag is taken up by my lens collection. With the DSLR, I can switch lenses to suit my subject and my distance from the subject. I get real zoom, not a fake digital one where you’re losing detail or image quality. I get precise control over what’s in focus in the shot, and what’s out of focus – a key part of the artistic side of photography.

A perfect example of what I mean is this shot taken last year in the Brecon Beacons.

In this photo, I’ve been able to make Mike the subject of this photo by making him the only part of the shot that’s in focus. At the same time, the photo works because you can still see what he’s doing – trying to capture Llyn Cwm Llwch on his camera phone. That was possible because I could use the zoom the frame the photo.

The rest of the bulk is the camera body itself. Combined with my lenses, I can shoot handheld in moonlight …

… or handheld in a conference hall (it’s so dark the laptop screen is the main source of light!)

… or I can take shots like this.

When it comes to challenging conditions like these, you can’t overcome physics. You need to gather enough light to have an image to capture. You need large lenses to gather that light, and you need a large sensor to capture that light without capturing too much visual noise at the same time.

Try and replicate these shots yourself on your camera phone to see for yourself.

Are DSLRs Too Difficult To Use?

To deliberately take a great shot with a DSLR, you need both technical mastery of your camera and artistic mastery of the medium. Of the top of my head, this includes:

• ISO speed – sensitivity setting of your sensor
• aperture size – controlling the amount and angle of light hitting the sensor
• shutter speed – controlling the length of the exposure when you take your picture
• focal length – to frame your shot
• focal length combined with distance to subject – to control visual distortion
• focal length combined with distance to subject and aperture size – to control depth of field
• focal length combined with ISO speed and shutter speed – to control camera shake
• height of the sun – to influence the colours in the photo
• angle of the sun – to control the blue of the sky
• angle of sunlight reflecting off the subject – to control highlights and shadows
• the histogram in the camera – to check for good contrast and exposure without over-exposing the shot
• image composition – who or what is the focus of the photo?
• image background – what else is visible in-frame?
• timing – what is moving? where is it moving to? where do you want it to be when you click that shutter release button?
• breathing – keeping the camera still so that the shot isn’t blurry

… and so on. Boy, does that seem like a lot of things to be juggling at once when taking a photo. No wonder photography seems hard!

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The whole time I’ve been taking photos, I’ve only once managed to capture exactly the photo that I wanted to. Once. Here it is.

That’s a shot from the end of the road I live on, taken during one of the rare winters where we actually had enough snow to be worthy of the name. Previous weekend, we’d driven along the road on the way to do Christmas shopping, and I’d pictured that exact scene as we carefully made our way out. It’s the one and only time that the final image is 100% what I wanted to capture.

If you’re interested, that’s a success rate of less than 1 in 10,000. It might be closer to 1 in 50,000.

It doesn’t mean that the other 99.99% of my photos aren’t good. With well over 1,000,000 views on Flickr to date, I must be doing something that you like. But yeah, taking photos is hard. Here’s some examples to show why.

That shot was taken (handheld again!) one evening in London. There was the technical challenge of shooting at night, where one stable primary light source (the sun) is replaced by lots of competing and sometimes chaotic primary light sources (street lights, shop displays, passing vehicle headlights). The subject is a silhouette of a passerby, reflected in the window of the Museum of London. I had to frame the shot, work out the required exposure, find an angle to manage reflections, all before the passerby had walked by.

That shot was taken on a walk through the woods at Beyond the Border one year. The main technical challenge was getting precisely focused on the light whilst throwing the leaves behind out of focus. Then there’s the need to find an angle to show the electric cable. It’s black, and could easily disappear because I’m reducing the amount of light that hits the sensor in order to show up the filament of the bulb.

Some flowers planted in a display at the Eden Project. Should be very simple, right? But what about the shadow being cast by that low sun? The shadow means that the part of the flower that’s nearest the lens is much darker than the leaf on the other side of the plant – and that’s reflecting the sun quite brightly. What’s the best angle to capture the flowers and their stems? Did you notice the building’s wall in the background? Did you notice the lines running along the wall? They’re as much a part of the photo as the flowers are.

My last example – a wing walker putting on a show at the Bristol Balloon Festival one year. Any time there’s sky in the photo, I’m thinking about where the sun is. The camera sees a different shade of blue depending on the angle between the sun and the lens. I need to hold the camera steady enough whilst tracking a moving object. Empty blue skies make for boring photos. I need to wait until there’s clouds in shot to make the background more interesting. I need to wait until the moment the wing walker is doing something that will look interesting in a still photo.

In each and every photo that’s worth publishing, from the simplicity of some flowers in a display to the complexity of one of the world’s leading cities at night, there’s always a lot that the photographer has to do to get the shot. Some of it is technical, and some of it is artistic.

If you replace a DSLR with a different kind of camera, does anything become easier? Well, in a word, no. At no time in any of those photos was the DSLR adding any complexity to the shot. If anything, the DSLR often made these shots easier. I’m not sure that any of them could have been duplicated on a camera phone, or on a compact camera that didn’t offer full control over shutter and aperture speed. And several of those shots benefitted from being able to use lenses that you can’t get on camera phones or compact cameras.

The complexity is inherent to photography as an art medium, and is down to physics (light) and composition (artistic taste). All that the DSLR does is expose you to that complexity. Nothing more.

Other Points In Favour Of DSLRs

The DSLR platform brings some important advantages over other types of camera.

I’ve already mentioned physics – the gathering of light, and the capture of light whilst controlling noise. Indoors, late at night, or more northernly or southernly you go, this becomes more and more important. It’s nearly always very dark indoors, and by definition it’s dark outside late at night. No surprises there. But, if you live in Canada or the States, you might not realise that it’s much brighter outdoors there than it is here in Europe. We’re much further north than you are. That makes it much harder to take good photos with smaller kit.

Phase detection auto-focus systems are, for me, the next advantage of the DSLR platform. This is an old technology, but it works almost flawlessly. And it’s fast. By contrast, contrast-based auto-focus systems are slow, inaccurate, and struggle to track subjects well or work in low-light. I’m sure that one day there’ll be enough computing power in cameras to overcome these problems, but right now they’re very hit-and-miss systems.

I must not forget manual focus. The ability to switch the motor off, and dial in the focus entirely by hand is an important artistic tool when combined with manual aperture control. Works best if you’re lugging around a tripod (more bulk!).

Inter-changeable lenses are important. Other platforms (notably micro four-thirds) also have inter-changeable lenses, but only the two leading DSLR platforms (Nikon and Canon) have an extensive range of lenses both from the manufacturer and from third parties such as Sigma. And the quality of those lenses … oh my.

I haven’t mentioned flash photography, as it isn’t something I do. But it’s another area where the DSLR platform offers a major advantage over other camera types.

DSLRs are very versatile tools. You can mix and match bodies and lenses to optimise for the kind of photography that you enjoy the most.

This is all good stuff, but it isn’t what prompted me to post in defence of the humble DSLR.

Final Thoughts

I work in tech, and it pays for my photography hobby. Over the last few years, there’s been a steady rise of a culture that I wasn’t aware of before. Somehow, it’s become acceptable not to know what you’re doing or how anything works. Sometimes it’s presented slightly differently – that’s there’s far too much for anyone to know – but the sentiment is the same. We’re moving from the days of the meta-ignorant to an active cult of the ignorant.

As many of the people I follow on Twitter work in tech, it is this culture spilling over into photography that I saw this afternoon. And honestly, I’m deeply deeply uncomfortable with the notion. It isn’t a culture that I grok.

Because I don’t understand it, I don’t want to call “bullshit” on it, and I don’t want to call people out who promote this culture. I don’t walk in their shoes, and I don’t see things through their eyes. I don’t know what the barriers are that are stopping you from learning the things that I have been able to learn.

The best I can do is offer to teach what I know. So, if there’s enough interest, I’ll make the time to put together an easy step-by-step course to the humble DSLR and basic digital photography. It’ll be a group course, run online, and there will be plenty of homework involved.

Just let me know if this is something you want.

When To Mock

Mocking has not only become a mainstream practice in recent years, it has also become the default practice for many developers. In this talk, I present three questions that you should ask yourself first whenever you’re deciding if a mock is the right way to test your code, and some insight into how over-mocking ends up making your tests no better than having no tests at all.

This talk was presented to PHP Dorset in November, 2014.

How Much Does Your ORM Cost?

Whenever you use an ORM, you’re trying to reduce the time it takes to ship your code. But what are you trading in return? This lightning talk introduces the idea that ORMs aren’t entirely “free”, and hopes to start you thinking about how you might go about measuring just how much that ORM is really costing you.

This talk was presented to PHP South West (where I was once the answer to a pub quiz question – my claim to fame!) in April 2015.

The Mad Science of Testing

I’m a firm believer that good testing is also good science, and in this talk, I hope to convince you too. And if we’re going to be scientists, we might as well be mad scientists, because they have all the fun

This talk was presented to PHP Berkshire in June 2015.

Back then, PEAR was the only tool available for distributing components. It was built in a time when hosting and sharing code was hard, and although PEAR made it possible to create components in PHP, PEAR never made it easy to do so.

Phix was an open-source tool that I wrote to sit on top of PEAR and make things easier. It gave you an easy-to-use build.xml file for Phing to automate all of the common tasks, a standardised file layout so that you could just drop in your code, and integration with Pirum so that you could build and publish.

Today, we don’t need any of these tools. PEAR has been replaced by Composer, and it’s so easy to use that there’s no need for Phing or a build.xml file. The PHP FIG standards have given us our file layouts, and as for publishing … today, all you need to do is push to GitHub and publishing happens automatically.

We no longer need Phix, and that’s a good thing.

It’s been an incredibly busy summer for me, but I did manage to get a little bit of photography in during September. I finally managed to dig through the photos last night, and this one immediately jumped out at me. I hope you like it as much as I do

As a belated birthday celebration at the end of January, Mrs H and I spent a day at the Royal Navy Fleet Air Museum at Yeovilton. We’d had a lot of fun with our cameras at Scotland’s National Museum of Flight, and ever since we’ve been looking to get to more air museums.

My first shot this week is the first shot I took in the museum – a close-up of the wing of a Supermarine Walrus. I just love the texture of this wing, and the unusual footprint painted on really caught my eye as we descended the ramp down to the floor of Hall 1. I’m assuming that the footprint is there to show maintenance crews where it is safe to step without putting their foot through the wing.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Last weekend was our warm-up day for the 3 Peaks Challenge. We walked up to the summit of Pen-y-fan and back twice in just over 5 hours. I was expecting my knee to be a major doubt for the walk, but it turned out that I’m so unfit that the knee was the least of my worries

I did take the camera with me for the first ascent, and snagged this shot on our first trip down. I hope you enjoy it.

On a technical note, despite good conditions, this ended up being the only shot I took that was worth publishing here. Shooting exclusively at f/2.8 on a full-frame camera body isn’t a good decision for landscape shots, especially if there’s no foreground subject to focus on. Lesson (hopefully) learned.

I’ll be back on Monday with the first of my shots from the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, from a shoot I did for my birthday this year. If you enjoyed my photos from Scotland’s Museum of Flight, then hopefully you’ll enjoy these too

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

From St Paul’s, I wandered south through the lanes (which you’ll see tomorrow) and down onto Waterloo Bridge for my last shot of the evening. You’ve got St Paul’s Cathedral, with the brightly lit Blackfriars Station immediately in front of it, and the lush purple lighting of Blackfriars Bridge just peeking in on the right.

A pro tip for any photographer who wants to join the crowds on Waterloo Bridge to capture this scene after dark: take a tripod. I shot this handheld at 200mm, but I’m shooting with crazy gear and I’ve had a lot of practice at stillness – and it was still the only usable image that I got from the bridge that night! If you’re using prosumer or entry-level gear, physics is against you, sorry. Take a tripod down to the bridge to avoid disappointment.

Or alternatively, do what I’m planning on doing in the summer and head down there at dusk to capture this scene towards sunset. I imagine it’ll make for spectacular photos – if you remember to take a tripod.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s photos. Tomorrow, I’ll publish a round-up post with all the images that I took for ‘London: After The Summit’. And tomorrow, I’m supposed to be spending the day climbing Pen-y-Fan in the Brecons as part of the training for the 3 Peaks Challenge. If weather permits, I hope to bag a few shots for a future set of wallpapers

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

From the Museum of London, I headed due south to the back of St Paul’s Cathedral. One of the great buildings of the world, like many iconic structures in the UK it has been so hemmed in by other buildings that it’s very difficult to photograph well from street level. Many photographers head over the river to the South Bank and shoot St Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge together. It’s become a terribly cliched shot, and it wasn’t one that I wanted to repeat, as frankly I’m fed up of seeing it regularly on Twitter. I want to seek out the photos that you hopefully haven’t yet seen.

I’d originally planned to shoot this from the north-east corner, but I couldn’t find a position where the shot wasn’t suffering from light pollution from everything else around. In the end, I ended up shooting through the trees down at the south-east corner. I think it makes for a strong image and a good wallpaper.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Directly opposite the bright lobby display in the gym are the circular walls of the Museum of London, and attached to those walls is are a couple of multi-segmented art deco lizards. You can’t see them from the skywalk entrances to the museum above – you have to come down to street level to be able to enjoy them.

Whilst I was trying to find the photograph in the lizards, I spotted this strong reflection of one of the shops opposite, and more by luck than by judgement I managed to bag this shot of someone walking by the shop. I think it’s a great photo, and probably my favourite of the whole evening.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

This week’s theme is ‘London: After The Summit’ – photos from an evening shoot in London last week.

From Smithfield Market, I wandered south to the Museum of London. In true British fashion, it’s built on a roundabout, and is connected to the surrounding streets by several elevated walkways. Down at street level, I spotted this bright lobby display beneath the local gym, and thought that it would make for something a little different. The display changes colour over time. I preferred the warm colours of the reds and oranges myself.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Last week, I was in London for this year’s Scale Summit, and afterwards I went for a wander through the City of London to try my hand at some night photography. I’d been in the City exactly a month earlier, speaking at the PHP UK Conference, and had spotted all of these interesting sights – but hadn’t had my camera with me at the time. Friday’s trip gave me the perfect opportunity to go back with my camera and see what I could capture for you.

My first photo this week is the magnificent roof and hanging clock of Smithfield Market. Originally built some 140 years ago, it’s got that Age of Progress vibe that you’ll find in old railway stations like London Waterloo and London Paddington – only much much cleaner and much better lit.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

The major feature of this release is a complete overhaul of how test devices (such as web browsers) are managed inside Storyplayer, and integration with Sauce Labs for cross-browser testing. It also comes with the usual upgrades to support the latest Selenium Webdriver, Chrome, Chromedriver and Browsermob-Proxy releases. (full changelog)

I’ve also (finally!) completed the manual which covers:

• installation and configuration of Storyplayer
• what stories are, and their test phases
• how to write tests for your stories, and how to create your own Storyplayer modules
• how to create test environments to test your apps in – right from inside your tests!
• a comprehensive reference to every module that ships with Storyplayer

You can add Storyplayer to your projects using Composer – you’ll find the package as datasift/storyplayer – or download as an experimental PHAR. (Please make sure you’ve installed the necessary dependencies first!)

Any problems, please let me know.

Storyplayer is the open-source test automation tool built by DataSift. Use it to bring your user stories to life using plain old PHP #noDSL. Create test environments; deploy code; test with real browsers, shell commands, and any PHP code; and clean up afterwards – all from your tests. Write your tests once, and run them against your dev, test, staging and production environments. Storyplayer ships with 20 modules, including support for Vagrant, Amazon EC2, and ZeroMQ, and can easily be extended with your own plugins.

To finish the week, here’s a set of solar cells, spotted beside the lighthouse on the Brough of Birsay up in the Orkneys. I was surprised at the patterns hidden in the cells; I think they’re beautiful.

(Delayed from yesterday due to a problem connecting to the Internet …)

Continuing this week’s theme of textures, here’s a rusty red corrugated roof, spotted in Kirkwall on Orkney’s Mainland.

Continuing this week’s theme of textures, here’s an extreme close-up of the side of a temporary bronze sculpture that I spotted outside Salisbury Cathedral recently.

Continuing this week’s theme of textures, here’s a close-up of the side of a cow, taken near the Tomb of the Eagles on Orkney’s Mainland.

This week’s theme is another collection of different textures, and to kick it off, here’s a close up of some wooden slats on the outside of one of the barns at Avebury in Wiltshire.

To finish this week’s wallpaper, a shot of the vividly orange flowers that you’ll find all over the mainland of Orkney. They’re in the towns and villages. They’re out in the countryside. They’re everywhere.

There’s something other-worldly about these flowers, standing on their own as they seek the sun.

I love colour contrasts, such as this shot of these purple flowers against the sea of very pale stalks of the plants.

This week’s theme is all about plants that have caught my eye when out and about.

I’m probably very guilty of posting many different variations on this type of shot, but I hope you don’t mind One of the reasons I switch to Canon is because I prefer how it sees greens, and I think it makes a nice wallpaper behind a desktop of icons.

This week’s theme is all about plants that have caught my eye. To start off, here we have an extreme close-up of a fan of leaves, as seen outside Salisbury Cathedral.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Earlier this month, I spoke to a packed audience at the PHP London user group meetup about Storyplayer, a test tool that we’ve open-sourced here at DataSift.

Here are the slides from that talk, for everyone who hasn’t yet seen them via Twitter:

If you can’t see the embedded slides in this blog post, they’re available over on SlideShare.

Right now, I’m focused on completing the online documentation (which is very much a work in progress), and preparing v1.1.0 with further improvements.

I’ve pushed out Phix 0.16.0 this evening, with the following changes:

• phing build-vendor now removes the component’s own code from the vendor/ folder. (We build the vendor/ folder using PEAR, which installs the component into the vendor/ folder … sigh)
• An update to Phing changed the default behaviour of the <fileset> tag, breaking backwards-compatibility. I’ve updated our build.xml file to make the <fileset> tag revert back to its original behaviour.

To update your copy of Phix, please run:

pear upgrade phix/phix4componentdev


Any problems, please let me know.

A guest photo by Mrs H!

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Last one of the week, and a lovely reminder of nicer weather than we’re enjoying today.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Another shot from the campus where I currently work. It’s a great place to escape to when you need to go for a walk to think and puzzle something out.

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Today’s wallpaper continues the theme of shots taken in the campus grounds around the office at work. It was a difficult one to edit, but I hope you enjoy the results.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

A shorter set of photos this week, as yesterday was a public holiday here in the UK.

I’m very lucky with where I work at the moment, as our office is set in the grounds of a very green and leafy university campus. Now that better weather has arrived, a few of us have been out wandering the grounds with our cameras, and this week I’m going to share some of those shots with with.

My first choice is a subject that I always struggle with – stacked logs of chopped wood. We get these a lot in the woods here in South Wales, but somehow I never feel that I do them justice. Maybe its because a photo can’t capture the smell of freshly chopped wood?

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

A guest photo by Mrs H!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Bringing the week to a close, I’ve saved this shot of the night sky over Skara Brae until this evening. A great accompaniment if (like me) you prefer working after dark through until the small hours on stuff.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s theme. I’ll be back next week with some more photos to share – probably on Tuesday, as Monday is a public holiday here in the UK.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

It’s Friday, and the week’s theme is almost done – but not quite, as I’ll have an extra wallpaper late this evening (UK time) to share.

I saw this kite flying in the skies above Dingyshowe Bay on the east coast of Orkney’s Mainland (the main island) at the end of last summer. It looked so alone up there, so far away from everyone and everything.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

This week’s theme revolves around things up in the sky.

Just a short walk east along the Thames from the O2 Arena, the south bank quickly becomes very industrial. It’s quite a contrast if (like me) all you really know is central London. But there’s no shortage of planes and helicopters passing overhead

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

This week’s them revolves around things up in the sky.

Last year, I went down to the far end of the Thames Path, and walked the section from the O2 Dome on the Greenwich Peninsula out to the Thames Barrier. The skyline was dominated by the new cable cars over the Thames. I haven’t been up in them yet … hopefully at some point this summer

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

This week’s theme evolves around things up in the sky.

Spotted this paraglider, flying over Avebury, enjoying the amazing view of one of the world’s great neolithic sites.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

I’ve got plenty more photos to share from our Easter break in Snowdonia, but I thought it’d be good to have a change of theme and celebrate the sunnier weather with a collection of shots of things in the sky.

To kick things off, here’s someone soaring above the magnificent neolithic stone circles of Avebury.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

To bring the week to a close, here’s a scene from just to the north of Harlech and its railway station. Spotting this from the car, there was no way I could carry on until I’d grabbed a shot showing this barn with the Rhinog mountain range in the background.

There’ll be another 25×9 shot on the blog tomorrow, and I’ll be back on Monday, probably with some more photos from Snowdonia. Have a great weekend!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

I couldn’t decide which photo I prefer – this one, or yesterday’s photo of Harlech Railway Station taken from the main road. Both have their strong points, so I’m going with this version of the shot for today’s wallpaper, and I’ll let you decide which one you like the most.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Harlech Railway Station lies on the plain below Harlech town and the world heritage castle, with the main road around Harlech and down to the beach cutting across the single track that leads up from Barmouth. It was particularly deserted on Easter Sunday, giving me plenty of time to safely grab this shot from the road.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Harlech Railway Station lies on the plain below Harlech town and the world heritage castle, with the main road around Harlech and down to the beach cutting across the single track that leads up from Barmouth. It was particularly deserted on Easter Sunday, giving me plenty of time to safely grab this shot from the road.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Today’s wallpaper continues the Easter in Snowdonia theme, and is another superb guest photo by the wonderfully talented Mrs H.

If you look closely at yesterday’s wallpaper photo, you can just make out this horse on the near horizon. I shot that photo full-frame, which limited how much I could pick out just the horse, but Mrs H was using a crop-sensor body, which allowed her to get much tighter on the horse than I could.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Continuing the theme of Easter in a snowy Snowdonia, here’s a lovely shot taken from the front of our hotel on Easter Sunday, just as we were checking out.

If you’re thinking of booking a stay in and around Harlech, I highly recommend staying at the Maes-y-Neuadd hotel, especially if (like me) you suffer from a food allergy. It’s a wonderful place with lots of character and fantastic food, and they did a fantastic job of making sure that they served up food that I could safely eat. We’ve been there a couple of times now, and we’ll definitely be going back again at some point in the future.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

My current theme is Snowdonia in the Snow at Easter, with guest photos by Mrs H!

I know I’m biased, but what a beautiful shot this is by Mrs H, looking up the Llanberis Pass, to end the week. (I think that’s Cae Gwyn right at the foot of the shot).

Have a great weekend, and I’ll be back on Monday with more photos from Snowdonia. And, as a bonus, there’ll be some great 25×9 format shots from our holiday starting tomorrow!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

My current theme is Snowdonia in the Snow at Easter, with guest photos by Mrs H!

We both stood at the foot of the Llanberis Pass for a bit, enjoying stretching our legs in the bright sunshine after the drive up from our home in South Wales, wondering whether or the pass was clear all the way up. We needn’t have worried, as the steady procession of coaches coming down the pass attested to it being nice and clear.

It was only during the drive up that we realised that the coaches weren’t coming down the pass, but were instead apparently coming from some sort of outdoor centre just around the corner!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

My current theme is Snowdonia in the Snow at Easter, with guest photos by Mrs H!

From the Menai Straight, we headed south to Llanberis, the village that sits at the foot of Mount Snowdon. We weren’t sure what conditions would be like – the Llanberis Pass had been closed when I’d last checked the day before. But it was open, and we were able to get some photos before we drove up through the pass.

The eastern side of the foot of the pass is dominated by Electric Mountain, the Dinorwig Hydro-electric Power Station that we studied as kids in school. The power station is built on the site of a disused slate quarry, which I believe is the Dinorwic Quarry.

From the pass, the snow highlighted these strange and distinctive pathways up the side of the old quarry face. This is the best of my efforts to pick them out and capture them.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Thanks to Brighton PHP for hosting this talk last month.

My current theme is Snowdonia in the Snow at Easter, with guest photos by Mrs H!

The Menai Straight is a body of water that separates the Isle of Anglesey from the mainland of North Wales. It’s spanned by two bridges: the Britannia Bridge (which we’ll see in a couple of weeks’ time), and Telford’s Menai Suspension Bridge. In the background are the mountains of Snowdonia, shivering in an unseasonal heavy fall of snow.

I’ve tried my hand at this shot before, back in 2003 with the Nikon D100. Things did look a lot warmer back then!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

I’m back! Had a bit of a break due to several hospital appointments all arriving at once. All of that is over for the time being.

Not only am I back, but this time I’m not alone. Mrs H and I spent Easter 2013 up in Snowdonia, enjoying the wonderful sight of the Welsh mountains after heavy snow. We both had our cameras with us, and over the next few weeks I’ll be including shots taken by both of us on the blog.

To get started, on the drive up to North Wales we stopped at Cross Foxes (what a fantastic name!) to enjoy the wonderful view of the ever-mighty Cadair Idris mountain and sub-peaks rising in the distance. One day, I want to go back when it’s sunny and enjoy the walks in the area; it’s something I haven’t managed to do yet.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

The key new features are:

• New ‘git hf push’ and ‘git hf pull’ commands, which do the right thing no matter which kind of branch you’re working in at the time.
• No more manual ‘git remote update’ before running HubFlow commands.

There’s also a long list of smaller changes and fixes too – many thanks to everyone who sent in a pull request or logged an issue.

The full ChangeLog is available.

I’m starting to get requests for documentation and portability fixes for Windows users. I don’t run Windows on any of my computers, so if there’s anyone out there who’d be interested in helping out, please let me know!

Of all the Nikons I’ve owned since the mid-90’s, it’s the one that stayed with me for the shortest time … but what memories it will be leaving behind. Many of the best photos that I’ve taken to date were done with this camera, including the first photo in my pick, taken at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

To finish this week’s theme, here’s one last shot of the restored Fowler 0-6-0 steam engine that stands outside the Erwood Station Arts Centre. This particular example has what looks like a water tank on the side, just in front of the driver’s cab. I just love the rich blacks in this shot, and the way the textured metal reflects the low winter sun.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s shots. I’ll be back on Monday with my next set of photos to share with you.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Outside the Erwood Station Arts Centre stands a restored Fowler 0-6-0 steam engine, painted in bright green. The winter weather has taken its toll a little bit, giving us this wonder textured metal in this shot.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

The front of the Fowler 0-6-0 steam engine at Erwood Station Arts Centre is painted very boldly, and proudly portrays the number 169. One for all of you lovers of all things red.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Out in the grounds of Erwood Station Arts Centre, you’ll find a restored Fowler 0-6-0 steam engine. This is a shot of one of the visible parts. My eye was drawn to the texture of the brushed / scraped metal, and to the contrast of the rust against the black paint.

I’ve no idea what it does though!

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Welcome back to another week of photos. The weather in 2013 is proving as difficult as last year, but a couple of weeks ago we did manage to get out in the snow to visit Erwood Station Arts Centre. Unfortunately, the Arts Centre itself doesn’t re-open until mid-February, but we were able to snag some interesting shots from around the re-created station platform outside.

Out in the car park, we found these lovely glass baubles hanging from a tree. We loved the contrast of the colours between them and the green steam engine in the background.

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Welcome to February … and to finish this week’s theme, here’s the most unusual door handles that I spotted whilst out and about amongst the shops.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s photos. I’ll be back on Monday with more desktop wallpapers.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Copper is another colour that’s underused these days, don’t you think?

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

I love the colour purple, and I think it’s such an underused colour. This is a nice wallpaper on its own, and if you’ve got two or more monitors, it’ll go very well with Clearance from last week.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

I love this window display … in a world of very generic, nondescript chains of shops, I think they deserve credit for doing something very different. And before anyone asks, the dirt is on their window, not my camera lens

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

After last week’s experiment (you all seem to really like photos with a lot of red in them!), I’m back to more traditional faire. This week’s theme is the last of my shots of shop windows from the Christmas sales. I hope you enjoy.

To kick things off, here’s a really striking image of a goth shoulder bag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cheerier-looking skull painting. Use this as your wallpaper, and you’ll get noticed from the other end of the office

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

A simple but striking logo that’s in great taste in its own right. Spotted in a shop window in Bourton-on-the-water during the Christmas sales.

That’s it for this week’s theme. It’s something a bit different from my usual style, but I hope you’ve enjoyed it nevertheless. I’ll be back with more wallpapers on Monday.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

Back when I was a child, the ‘never never’ was how families paid for appliances and furniture in the home. A striking message in black on white. Spotted in a shop window during the Christmas sales.

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A striking message delivered in white on red. Seen in a shop window during the Christmas sales.

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Simple, striking white on green. Taken during the Christmas sales in the shops.

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This week, I thought I’d try my hand at something quite different from my normal style of photography. Wandering around the shops during the Christmas sales, I’ve picked out simple slogans with bold colours. I hope you like it

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Street photography, taken in Manchester in October.

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He’s the wrong way to be desktop wallpaper, but I like this image too much not to share it with you. So he becomes the first of my ‘Tablet Wallpapers’

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

To bring this series of Manchester street shots to a close, here’s a shot that’s very much representative of our times today … an incomplete building that’s under construction.

Hope you have a great weekend. I’ve got a couple of extra shots to share with you tomorrow, and then I’ll be back on Monday with a new theme.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

A shot taken from the excellent venue for the PHPNW 2012 conference. Compare this with the View From The Bar that I took at the php|cruise conference back in 2004:

That’s the amazing thing about conferences … not only can you bring people together, but you can also draw them to great places.

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Street photography in Manchester, shot in October.

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Shot in Manchester in October.

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Street photography in Manchester, taken last October.

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Street photography in Manchester, taken last October.

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Street photography in Manchester from last October, taken early doors!

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Street photography in Manchester, taken last October early in the morning.

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Street photography in Manchester, taken last October early in the morning.

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Street photography in Manchester, taken last October before everyone woke up

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What terrible weather we’ve had over the last few months, especially for getting out and about with a camera. As a photographer, my New Year’s resolution is simple: make the most of every weekend whenever it’s dry, before the next weather front rolls in!

To get 2013 off to a good start, my theme for the next couple of weeks is street photography in Manchester. It’s a city I normally visit at least once a year for the PHP North West conference, and round every corner, there’s a photograph waiting to be discovered.

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Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

• PSR-0 has standardised autoloading in a practical way. Sure, it does have an evil design flaw (different classes can map to the same file on disk), but in practice it’s not a problem that happens.
• I’d have personally liked to have seen PSR-1 go further, and address method naming in more detail (in particular, that method names should start with a verb), and also address getters/setters and protected vs private.
• I’ve no personal interest in PSR-2, and am philosophically against “layout” coding standards like this.

… so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I decided to add PSR-3 support to a private framework I use to build test tools at DataSift.

What Is PSR-3?

PSR-3 is a proposed standard (voting has finished, it should appear as an accepted standard when the PSR folks recover from too much Christmas turkey) describing a common logging interface for PHP frameworks.

It’s based on a small subsection of RFC 5424, which describes the Syslog standard, which is a very sensible choice. Sysadmins think in terms of Syslog levels, and they utterly hate dealing with loggers that don’t map cleanly onto Syslog.

What Does The Interface Look Like?

To support PSR-3, you’re required to implement the following methods:

• emergency($message, $context = array())
• alert($message, $context = array())
• critical($message, $context = array())
• error($message, $context = array())
• warning($message, $context = array())
• notice($message, $context = array())
• info($message, $context = array())
• debug($message, $context = array())
• log($logLevel, $message, $context = array())

You can see the proposed interface in full here, including the constants for $logLevel.

The $context is a list of named parameters to substitute into the $message. The special parameter ‘exception’ is reserved for an exception that needs to be added to the logs.

A Critique of PSR-3

PSR-3 is built on a good idea, but there’s three areas where I think PSR-3 could have been better:

• the method names in the LoggerInterface
• the handling of the exception parameter
• the LogLevel constants

I’d have also liked to have seen trace level logging supported, although I can understand why most PHP developers won’t be aware of that practice.

Better Method Names

It’s perhaps a small thing, but I’m a big fan of making code more readable by having all method names start with a verb. I find that it makes code more self-descriptive, and that it’s much easier for casual contributors to grok.

So, instead of this:

• $logger->emergency(“Captain, she canna take no more”);

we could instead have had:

• $logger->logEmergency(“Captain, she canna take no more”);

Like I say, a small thing, but in my experience it’s improving all of the small things that leads to big successes, especially in larger code bases.

Handling The Exception Parameter Properly

To paraphrase, the PSR-3 standard says this about the $context parameter: “here’s a list of key/value parameters, but one is special”. That “but” is a code smell!

Not being able to treat all of the key/value parameters equally (slightly) increases the complexity of handling $context, increases the performance cost of logging, and forces the Logger implementation to do things that PHP could handle for us.

A better solution would be to move the exception out of the $context and make it a separate parameter like this:

• logEmergency($message, $context = array(), Exception $cause = null)

This would allow PHP to make sure that only a genuine Exception was passed into the log method, and would allow the implementation to treat all of the key/value pairs in $context equally. This is a cleaner interface to implement.

Log-Level Constants

RFC 5424 defines the log levels as an ordered set of integers. This is deliberate, as it makes it trivial to say “only log warnings and above”. Unfortunately, because it was difficult to crowbar this into Monolog, the decision was taken to go with strings for the log-level constants. This regrettably increases the complexity of all other loggers.

If you look at pull-request to add PSR-3 to Monolog, you’ll notice that Monolog is explicitly relying on the value of the PSR-3 constants to map them directly onto Monolog class constants:

375	+    public function log($level, $message, array $context = array())
376	+    {
377	+        if (is_string($level) && defined(__CLASS__.'::'.strtoupper($level))) {
378	+            $level = constant(__CLASS__.'::'.strtoupper($level));
379	+        }
380	+
381	+        return $this->addRecord($level, $message, $context);
382	+    }

This is done because (ironically) Monolog already uses numerical log levels internally, with the debug level having a value of 100, and the emergency level having the value of 600. There was obviously the risk of Monolog log level constants being passed in instead of the PSR-3 constants, where it would have been impossible to tell them apart if they were both numeric. I’m sure other existing loggers probably face similar issues.

It’s a tricky issue, but on balance I think the wrong decision was made here for the wrong reason, and the community would have been better served longer-term if PSR-3 had supported the RFC 5424 values for the log level constants.

Final Thoughts

PSR-3 isn’t objectionable … it’s just that it could have been a bit better than it is.

I’ve added both PSR-3 support and the revised methods from this blog post to my internal LogLib. PSR-3 will allow me to inject LogLib into third-party components that support it. My own code will be using the revised methods I’ve proposed here, for the reasons mentioned above.

Back in October, I did some photography at the PHP North West 2012 Conference in Manchester. According to Flickr, I had about 20,000 extra views as a result.

The PHPNW Effect is mighty indeed!

“This e-book will hopefully show you how to put yourself across to a prospective employer in a way that makes it easy for them to spot what you have to offer them, to increases your chances of successfully finding a job in the United Kingdom’s computing industry.

“Recruitment processes vary from employer to employer. I’ll take you through the most likely steps that you need to get through. I’ll explain the process from the employer’s perspective first, and then from your point of view as someone applying for a job. A better understanding of what the recruitment process is, and why, will help you avoid the common pitfalls along the way.

“The second part of the book is more about you, about what you need to do to be prepared for when you join the industry, either during an industrial placement year or when you graduate and leave academia. Ours is a multi-disciplined industry where things change rapidly, so to help you prepare, I’ve finished off the book with some lists of the fundamental skills that industry expects you to have before you start your first job.”

Getting Hired is a free ebook released under a Creative Commons licence. I hope you find it useful.

See more of my photos from the PHPNW12 conference on Flickr.

Changes In This Release

The main change in this release is that you now must merge your feature into the develop branch via a pull-request before using the git hf feature finish command. (You can override this behaviour, and get feature finish to do the merge for you, by using the -f flag).

The full changelog is available on our GitHub pages.

Upgrading From An Older Release

To upgrade to this release, please run:

sudo git hf upgrade

If that doesn’t work (because you’re on an older version of HubFlow that doesn’t have the upgrade command), please re-install:

git clone https://github.com/datasift/gitflow
cd gitflow
sudo ./install.sh

This week’s theme is some shots taken at Symonds Yat Rock during the recent August bank holiday.

To end this theme: it was a hot day, and the refreshments hut had a skylight open in a vain attempt to let some of the heat out.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s photos as much as I’ve enjoyed taking them. I’ll be back on Monday with some more of my photos from Scotland’s National Museum of Flight.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

–

If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.

This week’s theme is some shots taken at Symonds Yat Rock during the recent August bank holiday.

It was such a hot day that I was half-expecting someone to hook a hosepipe up to this outside tap to start cooling everyone down with it.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

–

If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.

This week’s theme is some shots taken at Symonds Yat Rock during the recent August bank holiday.

Whilst we were eating our lunch at the refreshments hut, my eye was drawn to a 4×4 parked next to the hut. My companions were utterly baffled when I reached for my camera – hopefully now they can see why I did

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

–

If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.

This week’s theme is some shots taken at Symonds Yat Rock during the recent August bank holiday.

The walk from the car park up to the refreshments hut took us past this lovely little carving of a fortified hill village and the cliffs below it.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

–

If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.

For the August bank holiday, Mrs H and I went over to Symonds Yat Rock with friends for the day, and for this week’s wallpapers, I want to share with you some of the shots I got on the day.

Today, we have matching his and her’s seats, perfect for couples out for a stroll under the trees.

Copyright (c) Stuart Herbert. Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Photography: Merthyr Road | Daily Desktop Wallpaper | 25×9 | Twitter.

–

If you’re reading this in the RSS feed, my original blog post also includes a Google map showing where this photo was taken. Unfortunately I haven’t managed to get the map to appear yet in the RSS feed, so for now you’ll have to click through to my blog if you want to see the map. Sorry.